Goby, with New iPhone App, Shifts Focus from Activity Search to Mobile Recommendations

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Please…not yet another recommendation engine for telling me where I should eat, what clothes to buy, or which places to visit on my trips. Didn’t StyleFeeder get acquired by Time Inc. last year? Didn’t Where just get bought by PayPal? But I guess that’s why startups keep trying to innovate with recommendations—if they do it right, there will be a big payout coming.

Goby already had a mobile app on iPhone and Android devices, but the new app’s emphasis is on understanding consumers’ preferences and showing them a short list of relevant activities, instead of just helping them search through long lists. (Goby made the change in part because of user feedback, but you can still search in the app as well.) Before last week’s release, Watkins said the company had some 750,000 mobile-app downloads, and that its user base was split about 50-50 between mobile and Web. Reached by e-mail yesterday, Watkins says the new app had about 70,000 downloads in the past week, and that about half of the new users have created personalized “fun feeds” (more on that in a minute). Overall, not a bad start for the new Goby app.

Mobile has been a big focus at the 10-person startup over the past nine months. Goby, along with a lot of other companies, seems to have adapted quickly to the reality that mobile is a better business opportunity for its technology than the Web. “People are hungry for mobile apps, and advertisers are hungry to reach them,” Watkins says.

The new app is all about showing people five to 10 activities that interest them, Watkins says. Goby scans users’ Facebook profiles and uses semantic text analysis to create a “topic map” of things people like. The categories include sporting events, live music, museums, food and drink, and so forth. Goby also has access to a huge database of events and activities, culled from a variety of sites around the Web. By personalizing your own feed, you can do things like get alerts for heavy-metal acts playing in Worcester, MA, or jazz artists coming through Boston. The app also makes it easy to share the info with your social network through Facebook and Twitter, Watkins says.

The technology sounds simple—but it’s not. One issue is that semantic analysis and … Next Page »